A company called Throne wants to take pictures of your poop, before having a combination of artificial intelligence and human physicians analyze it. While this may seem to be a combination of gross, creepy, and unnecessary, there is some serious science behind the idea.
Throne Wants to Use AI to Analyze Your Poop
Throne is selling a camera that attaches to your toilet seat in order to take pictures of your poop. Those images are then sent via Bluetooth to an app, as well as to Throne’s servers for analysis.
First, what Throne calls “artificial gut intelligence” will take a look. This has been “trained by physicians to help you understand what your waste is trying to tell you about your health.” Then, Throne’s “team of physicians manually review anonymized images to classify poop as healthy or unhealthy, spot the nuances in urine color for hydration levels, and identify other health indicators in your waste.”
There are some obvious privacy and security concerns here, and Throne only added a page addressing these issues after TechCrunch inquired about them. However, the company promises to “only capture images of the contents of your toilet bowl.” So, that’s OK then.
Currently in beta, the toilet attachment costs $299, though the version to follow has an MSRP of $499. Upon general release, the app will cost $96/year, but anyone pre-ordering Throne gets access throughout the beta, plus one year free.
Gut Health Is Important, But Questions Remain
The fact is, gut health is important, and there is currently a lot of research being done to determine quite how important it is to your overall health. Humans inherently know that the state of their stools can indicate other issues, which is why many of us take a look before flushing.
However, regardless of all that, how many of us will want someone else looking at our waste products anywhere other than in a lab? And how many people will be comfortable having a camera sitting inside their toilet bowl?
If Throne can convince enough people that this is all fine, then it may be onto something. But I suspect that, regardless of how involved AI is getting in healthcare, most of us will continue to peer inside the bowl as and when necessary, and consult a doctor when something seems off.
